Pages

Thursday, November 26, 2015

It is remarkable how tiny pieces of news help us to see much larger,
worrisome trends.

For instance, we now learn that the Natural Resources Ministry has been
poking about, seeking a partner to help maintain the Sherborne Road. The gravel road
winds 12 kilometres from Highway 35 just south of Dorset through the bush to
Sherborne Lake.

It is an access road for anglers, hunters, hikers, campers,
snowmobilers, ATV riders and logging operators.

The ministry is asking various sources, including Algonquin Highlands
Township, to take on the costs of maintaining the road. It says it can no
longer afford the upkeep.

The good news here is that the Ontario government may be getting serious
about its dire financial situation. It must be when it goes begging for help
maintaining a 12-kilometre gravel road.

The bad news is that if the government cannot afford to maintain the
road, nature will take it back, limiting access to a huge wilderness recreation
area. Also, the Sherborne Road is a glimpse of the new trend in which citizens
pay more to receive less.

The Sherborne Lake road story illustrates how badly Ontario is hurting from
years of less than brilliant financial management. And, how the current
government is relentless in squeezing taxpayers for more and more dollars to
try drag itself out of a quicksand of debt.

Our electricity bills will increase at least an average $120 a year Jan.
1, on top of a series of stunning increases this year. Driving and vehicle
licensing fees have increased and will increase more. We all will receive
higher municipal tax bills in the spring because of more downloading of Ontario
Provincial Police costs onto rural municipalities.

Then we have the service fees placed on top of service fees at Service
Ontario outlets. And, the plans to make High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes High
Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes.

Not to mention the new three-cents-a-litre provincial tax on beer, which
took effect this month.

The government is desperate for more money to service its overwhelming
debt. Ontario residents can expect this trend to continue, and likely worsen.

Ontario’s debt has surpassed $300 billion. California, poster child for
reckless government spending and poor financial management, has less than half
the debt of Ontario.

Bonnie Lysyk, Ontario’s auditor general, expects the Ontario debt to
reach $325 billion by 2017-18. To pay off that debt Ontario would have to
collect $23,000 each from every woman, man and child in the province.

Ontario pays more than $11 billion a year in debt interest charges. That
is more than the province spends on post secondary education for our children.

Credit raters have been following closely this plunge into deeper debt. Moody’s
Investor Services and Standard and Poor’s have downgraded Ontario’s credit
rating in recent months.

The province plans to spend another $130 billion on infrastructure over
the next 10 years, which will increase the debt load even more. Much of the spending
will be to alleviate the nightmare of Toronto-area transportation.

The government says going deeper into debt will spur economic growth,
which will produce more dollars to pay off debt. We all hold our breath and
hope this is true. Past performance leaves us skeptical.

Another reason for skepticism is the controversy surrounding the
government’s selling off 60 per cent of Hydro One. It hopes to bring in $9
billion from the sale but in fact will realize only $3.5 to $5 billion after
the utility’s debt is paid.

Some observers call the Hydro One offering a disaster in the making.

Stephen LeClair, the province’s financial accountability officer, says
that selling the utility to private investors will cost the provincial treasury
more than it takes in.

“The province’s net debt would initially be
reduced, but will eventually be higher than it would have been without the
sale,” he wrote in a critical review of the plan.

Deterioration of the Sherborne Lake access road
would be a disappointment to users, but not a catastrophe. Real catastrophe
will come to all of us if the government does not create a strong plan for
reducing its debt.

Thursday, November 19, 2015

I listen for sounds of movement but the woods
are as silent as the wet stones on the hillside. Rain drips off my hunting cap
brim, each drip telling me that no sensible deer, or person, would be out in
this foul weather.

I am too stubborn to go home and get out of the
wet. So I sit in the rain, thinking wildly abstract thoughts.

One of my wilder thoughts is about why we can’t
make some use of all the dead and dying wood in the forest. The forest floor is
littered with trees that have died and fallen, or been taken down by the wind
or in logging. And, there is much standing dead that remains solid and sturdy.

This is especially noticeable today, and not
just because my mind is damp and wandering. I am in a logging area behind Dan
Lake in the Frost Centre lands. The amount of wasted wood left here to rot is
astonishing.

Aside from the usual deadfalls there are piles
of tree crowns, hundreds of chunky branches and a variety of logs left behind.

This is not a criticism of the loggers, who are
doing what they are instructed to do. They are following guidelines set by the
Ministry of Natural Resources which oversees the logging.

In fact, they appear to be going beyond the
guidelines. In one staging area they have left standing a magnificent and elderly yellow birch which will live a bit
longer to spread its seeds. And they have been more than tolerant of any
hunters or others passing through their work areas.

The crowns and branches and leftover logs are
being left to rot because that’s what the government wants.

Some time back I let slip within earshot of a
government official that I was taking firewood from a logged over area. I
received a lecture on why it is good to leave wood to rot in the forest and was
told to apply for and pay for a licence to collect firewood.

The official’s lecture on the benefits of letting
wood rot in the forest was correct, to an extent. Trees that die naturally are
a necessary part of the cycle of forest life.

However, logging, which when done selectively
aids forest health, creates more rotting wood than any forest needs. Clearing
out the excess and putting it to use would be helpful to the forest and to
people who could use it.

I can think of several uses, the most important
being firewood for heating. Many people turned to electric heat for homes and
cottages in the days when electricity was affordable. Now the cost of heating
electrically is prohibitive for many people and they depend more on firewood.

The government says people can collect firewood
on Crown lands if they apply for a licence and pay government timber charges.

Charging citizens for collecting firewood from
deadfalls and logging leftovers is an example of government and its
bureaucracies at their worst. There is
no cost to government for people to collect fallen timber for firewood, so
licensing charges are simply another tax, another money grab.

If there is a need to supervise people
collecting firewood from extensive deadfall areas, let private organizations do
it. Church groups, service clubs and the such could supervise deadfall
harvesting and make a few much needed bucks doing it.

Governments do not view wood as a renewable heating
resource important to people living outside major urban areas. They see it as a
pollution problem, which is nonsense considering the many sources of human-made
pollution.

Government thinking on fuel wood will not change
because government policies, even policies affecting rural areas, are made in
downtown urban areas. They are made by urbanites who listen to major media
outlets, lobbyists and special interest groups, all of which occupy urban
downtown offices.

Yes, rain falling in a quiet forest tends to
produce abstract thoughts. Thoughts that bring to mind Henry Thoreau’s essay Civil
Disobedience, in which he accepts that “government
is best which governs least," and by extension "government is best which governs not
at all."

Thursday, November 12, 2015

I have a new granddog. His name is Rusty and he
is a rescued dog from Los Angeles.

Rusty was given up by his owners who kept a
bunch of backyard dogs and he wasn’t well looked after. He had a recent scar on
his head and had lost hair around one eye because of an infection.

He’s now a happy, well cared for and important
member of my daughter’s family in the San Francisco area.

I don’t know much of Rusty’s history except that
he escaped the fate of many dogs living in the Los Angeles area. Roughly 6,000
dogs are impounded in LA shelters every year. More than 1,000 are euthanized.

Statistics about impounded pets truly are
amazing, and disturbing. In the United States 6.8 million pets are taken into
shelters every year. Pets of all sorts, but the vast majority are dogs and
cats. An estimated three to four million are euthanized every year.

A survey of Canadian animal shelters found that
46,000 dogs were impounded in 2013. The number of cats taken in was roughly
double the total for dogs.

Almost one-half the dogs taken in were strays
and just over one-third of the total were given up by their owners. Of the
overall total, 17 per cent were puppies.

Of the 46,000 Canadian dogs taken in, 8,000 were
euthanized. That’s 1,000 fewer than in 2012, which we would like to think is
because more people are becoming involved in pet rescue organizations. There
are no statistics to support this, but rescue efforts seem to be attracting more
people willing to volunteer their time, and in some cases their money, to
ensure that unwanted, abandoned or mistreated animals are given a chance for a
new life.

Two of the most interesting rescue organizations
are California-based Wings of Rescue and Pilots N Paws, based in South Carolina.
These are volunteer groups that recruit volunteer pilots and planes to relocate
pets to areas where rescue groups are able to find them permanent homes.

Pilots N Paws has flown more than 15,000 dogs to
new homes in the last two years and says it has relocated 75,000 over the last
seven years.

Wings of Rescue says it has saved 5,000
dogs and cats and plans to rescue 7,000 more by the end of this year. Next
week its Annual Holiday Airlift will fly 1,000 dogs and cats in 20 aircraft
from Van Nuys general aviation airport in LA. The pets will be flown to various
locations in the U.S., mainly on the west coast.

The flying rescues
work well because there are overcrowded, high-kill shelters in some states like
California. Yet other states like Oregon, Florida and New York need more pets
to satisfy adoption demands.

For instance, Coeur
d’Alene, Idaho has many retired people looking for smaller dogs which are
easier to care for but hard to come by because of high demand. So the humane
society there orders a planeload of dogs under 16 pounds every month to meet
adoption demands.

Yehunda Netanel
started Wings of Rescue as a lone pilot who rescued 300 dogs. The number of
dogs Wings now flies has been doubling every year.

Pilots N Paws reports similar growth.

"We have seen the number of animals rescued
go up every year since we started in 2008," said Kate Quinn, executive
director of Pilots N Paws, told the Associated Press.

"Pilots love a reason to fly,” Quinn says.
“They love making these flights."

Some people raise ethical questions about
spending time, money and other resources on rescuing animals when so many
humans are in distress. Why rescue dogs when millions of Syrians, and others
are homeless? they ask.

Obviously there is no quick and easy answer to
that question. Except to say that we all have a responsibility to help
alleviate cruelty of all kinds in this world. And, not spending time and
resources to stop cruelty to animals will not likely do much to stop cruelty
against humans.

At any rate, my granddog Rusty is certainly
happy that there are people volunteering their time and resources to help
abused and abandoned dogs in Los Angeles.

Thursday, November 5, 2015

I totally get why Education Minister Liz Sandals
feels the way she does about receipts. They are a pain in the butt. So
difficult to organize. Always impossible to find when needed.

They swell our wallets, clutter our vehicle
dashboards and are bad for the environment. The Internet tells me that 640,000
tons of paper receipts are used in the US
each year. And, it takes 1.2 billion gallons of water annually to produce
those paper receipts.

So we understand why Minister Liz
can’t be bothered asking for receipts for the taxpayer dollars she gave teachers’
unions to cover their travel, hotel and food expenses while negotiating new
working contracts. After all, she does have a masters degree in mathematics and
knows the price of pizzas. With those qualifications who needs receipts?

“You’re asking me if I have receipts and
invoices; no, I don’t,” she said when asked if she got receipts for $2.5
million in teacher union expense spending. “You don’t need to see every bill
when you’re doing an estimate of costs. I don’t ask.”

"We know what the meeting rooms cost. We
know what the food costs. We know what 100 pizzas cost.”

When you are that smart and up on the cost of pizzas,
asking for receipts seems old-fashioned and unnecessary.

The practice
of getting and giving receipts might be old-fashioned in the sense that it has
been around for a long time. Roughly 5,200 years actually. All the way back to
the time when writing was invented.

So billions of people over 50
centuries have thought receipts are a good thing, especially when it comes to
managing money. Billions of people, but not Liz Sandals.

Written receipts are believed to date back to
3200 BC in Mesopotamia. The oldest known existing receipt was given 4,000 years
ago to a guy named Alulu in Samaria. It was for the sale of five sheep, a lamb
and four grass-fed goat kids and was written on a clay tablet.

Presumably Alulu was not as smart at math as Liz
Sandals, and not up to speed on the price of livestock, so that’s why he asked
for the receipt.

Someone must have told Premier Wynne about Alulu
and receipt history because she overruled her education minister. She says the
teachers’ unions have not yet been given the $2.5 million but when they are receipts
will be required.

So Ontario taxpayers can breathe easier knowing
that their government says it intends to follow the 5200-year-old practice of
getting receipts.

That still leaves us with a worrisome problem,
however. Why are taxpayers paying teachers’ union expenses while they negotiate
higher salaries and better working conditions?

Minister Liz says the money is being shelled out
because of the transition to a new bargaining system with teachers.

“When you are going through a transformational
process, if you want the transformation to work, the first thing to do is to
get the people into the building and committed to making the process work by
being there . . . ” she said.

I assume that means that unless the government
pays travel, hotel and food (including pizzas) expenses, the teachers’
negotiators will not show up to negotiate. The last time I was in a union we
paid dues to build a fund to pay expenses like negotiating working agreements.

However, this latest scandal is about more than just
who pays for the pizza. It’s all about politics.

During the 2014 provincial election the Ontario
Secondary School Teachers’ Federation and the Ontario English Catholic
Teachers’ Association together spent more than $3 million on political advertising.
Most of it was for ads attacking the Liberal government’s main opponent, the
Conservatives.

So the government makes secret payments for
teachers’ union expenses (including pizzas), plus gives them special favors and
rich contracts. In return the teachers’ unions spend money, some of it which
came from taxpayers, to ensure the government stays in power.

The government says it is routine to pay teacher
union expenses incurred in negotiations.